


The Unending War

by Martin Iceworth (Iceworth)



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Children, F/M, Family, Mental Health Issues, Post-War, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 07:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iceworth/pseuds/Martin%20Iceworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a rite of passage for a child to resent their parents before they grow up, and Shepard's children are no exception. The war is over, but Commander Shepard has never stopped fighting, and only Maddy's father keeps the family together as Shepard struggles not to drown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unending War

Maddy’s earliest memory was of her mother being sick. She was three, maybe four years old. She never asked; her parents never talked about her mother’s illness. In the memory, her mother clung to a young Maddy and cried. Maddy can’t remember the exact words her mother choked out, but she remembered the overwhelming panic that didn’t fade even when her father pulled Maddy away from her mother’s arms, crooning to the both of them.

Today was bad. Maddy came home singing a song for a play at school, and in front of her eyes, her mother fell apart.

Even as the tears started, Maddy didn’t miss the wide-eyed look of surprise on her mother’s face, as if her body was something independent of herself. Her mother had shook her head, apologised over and over, tried to pull herself together. Couldn’t. Maddy had left her slumped against the kitchen counter, shaking, hiding her face in shame.

When she fetched her father, his mandibles twitching with concern, he had no words of blame. He never did. Never blamed Maddy or her brother if something they did made her cry, if an eggshell cracked beneath their feet. He’d gently shooed Maddy away, told her to intercept Alerius when he came home, and bundled her mother away to the fortress of their bedroom. There, Maddy knew, her father would stand guard over her mother as if she was a dying comrade in arms, fending off visitors, messages and children.

Maddy let Alerius know when he came home from his after-school drama class. Cooked them both dinner. Made sure Alerius was in bed by nine, as she did every night. Her parents had stopped paying attention to bedtimes years ago.

The children of lovers were orphans, someone told her once. She wondered what it made her, the child of two PTSD-stricken soldiers who clung to each other as if afraid they’d both drown if they let go. Tomorrow was her sixteenth birthday; Maddy wondered if she’d celebrate it alone this year.

At ten o’clock, when she was turning off all the lights, Maddy found her father sitting alone on the sofa. Her heart dropped to her stomach.

“Dad?” Maddy entered the living room, tension tight in her belly. Why wasn’t he with her mother? Why wasn’t he looking after her? Her father looked up, blue eyes reflecting the orange of his omnitool as she stepped reluctantly across the carpet. “Is everything okay?” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Is Mum okay?”

“She’s asleep.” Her father tilted his head in the way only turians did. “It was a big one today. Something that she hadn’t faced in a while came up.”

“What did I do?”

“Nothing.”

“ _Dad_. I know that’s not true.”

She hesitated to stand up to her mother, worried that the slightest provocation would shatter her like glass. Her father wasn’t so bad. As long as her mother wasn’t upset, Maddy could push her father and he rarely minded. When her mother was triggered, he became rigid, unyielding, almost tyrannical. _Go to bed. No arguing. I don’t care it’s only six, go to bed, now, or you’re grounded for a month._ And he always kept his word, too. 

But she was asleep, so he would be her father, tonight, not a soldier.

“Shepard doesn’t want you two to feel you can’t do anything around her.” The orange glow of the omnitool dimmed. _Too late for that_ , Maddy thought, sitting on the other end of the sofa. “What she deals with is her responsibility. She’s already worried she’s alienated you two because of it.”

The memory of being four years old and clung to by a weeping adult, a sight which would terrify any small child, came to Maddy’s mind. “What did I do?”

“She wouldn’t tell me at first.” Garrus sighed, then. “She’s always saying she can handle it. You were… singing a song similar to one a friend of ours once sang in the war.”

Maddy knew what that meant. Whenever the explanation for a crying jag was, ‘it reminds her of someone she used to know,’ that someone was always dead. “I’m sorry, I — “

“Didn’t know,” said her father, with a firmness that reminded her of the no-nonsense protector that sprung into action whenever her mother faltered. “It’s not your fault, Maddy. She said so herself.”

Her parents always spoke for each other. _He wasn’t there when his mother died_ , she would say _. She panics whenever I cough, she’s always worried I’ll keel over on her_ , he would say _. It always wrecked him that he didn’t find me until it was almost too late_ , she would say _._

Maddy hugged her knees. “Why are you out here? You’re always with her.”

“I had work to do.” Her father sounded sheepish. “I, uh, meant to do it this afternoon.”

_Then Mum had a breakdown_ , Maddy didn’t say. Her father side-eyed her, waiting to smack down any snide comments that exposed her mother’s vulnerabilities.

“She’s better than she used to be,” he offered a tentative olive branch. She could hear his real meaning in his words. _Please love your mother. Please love your mother. It’s not her fault. It’s not your fault. Please love your mother._  

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Never?”

“It bothers me it interferes in her life. It bothers me it tears her apart. It bothers me that it hits her so hard she doesn’t know how to cope.”

“That’s not what I…”

“Maddy.” There it was, again, the no-nonsense _don’t you dare argue with me_ in his tone of voice. Subtle, but if she nudged the sleeping dragon, it would wake. “She’s _sick_. I could never hold that against her. I love her, more than anything, and I will always be there for her. Just as she’s always been there for me.”

“But you weren’t, once, were you?”

She hadn’t meant to say that. It slipped out. It was a sentence constructed from scraps of sentences her mother off-handedly said through the years. _I thought he was dead those years_ , she’d said once, _when you were very little_. How she’d begin some stories with _when I was in hospital_. How her mother always wore long sleeves, even on sweltering summer days on visits to Earth.

“When the war was over I was stranded on the other side of the galaxy,” said Garrus. “For years, actually. You were three and a half when I got back, and your mother was… in a bad way.”

“What happened?” This might be the only chance to get the story out of either of them.

“She was functional,” said Garrus. “If anything, she seemed a lot more normal than she is today. Happy, even. But she couldn’t remember who I was, couldn’t remember her crew…” He shrugged. “We thought it was amnesia first, but over time, the more we were around her, the more it became apparent that she’d suppressed the memories. She’d been so traumatised she’d blocked out every year after she enlisted in the Alliance. That was over fifteen years of memories, all gone. She did remember, over time, but it was a painful process. She had to be hospitalised. She was…” Garrus tilted his head. “Imagine her as she was this afternoon, only several times worse, and imagine it being 24/7. I was terrified she’d never come out of it. She was convinced she had lost her sanity, that I was just a hallucination, that she’d gone insane and imagined all of the reaper war, or that it was all a dream.”

Maddy listened, enraptured.

“She was constantly hurting herself, always crying, thinking that if she died she’d wake up.” Her father had that faraway look in his eyes, now. “You know that shake she has in her hands? The way she can’t even tie her own shoelaces? One of her suicide attempts…” His voice threatened to crack. “She almost succeeded. It left her with brain damage and her fine motor control’s never going to be the same.” His talons curled. “It didn’t help that schizophrenia ran in her family; she was sure she’d had it all along, that she had some kind of psychosis, that she’d hallucinated everything, made it all up, made you up, made _me_ up.” He sighed. “She did come out of it, but it was a long, hard struggle. I thought I’d lost her. I’m just… I’m just grateful your mother looked after her. Your _othe_ r mother, I mean, your biological mother. If she hadn’t given your mother a place to live before she died, I don’t think Shepard would have been alive by the time I returned.”

Another memory; her mother, curled up on the same sofa Maddy and her father sat on now. Her arms around a tiny, baby turian. Alerius. Her mother looked so tired, in those days, and her eyes had always been red. But whenever Maddy was in the room, whenever her father walked in, Shepard’s eyes lit up and she never stopped smiling. She gazed at Maddy’s father as if she worshipped the ground he walked on.

The only reason Maddy still loved her mother was because she’d never stopped looking at him that way.

She shifted along the sofa and cuddled up to her dad. “I love you both, you know,.”

Her father’s arm curled around her shoulders. “We love you too, Maddy. So much.”

She heard the guilt in his voice. Sometimes, she wondered if he knew the war was over. If her mother knew the war was over.

Their generation fought the war on the front. Maddy’s fought it at home.

_It’s a human thing_ , she’d once heard her mother say to her father. _Humans aren’t like turians. For your kind, the war is over. Palaven mourns its dead, it’s still rebuilding, but whenever I look at a turian it’s almost like it never happened. When something big like this happens, it takes humanity generations to process it. Her children will carry our scars. So will their children._

“Garrus?” said her mother’s voice. “Come to bed.”

Maddy looked up. Her mother was at the bottom of the stairs in a white dressing gown. When she caught sight of Maddy she winced. “Sorry, Maddy, didn’t see you there.”

“It’s alright, we’ve finished talking.” Maddy’s father squeezed her shoulders and tapped his forehead against her temple, before he rose. “I’ll do my work in the morning.”

“Oh, you have work to — oh. I’m sor — “

Garrus laughed. “It’s no big deal.”

It was, Maddy knew, he wouldn’t have left her mother even sleeping unless the work was important. Her mother knew it, too, Maddy could see it in her eyes, that perpetual look of guilt that wasn’t far from her features. 

But her mother smiled anyway.

When Maddy moved to go up the stairs, her mother caught her in a hug. Her mother smelt like soap, the honey and milk type she only used when she was upset. Sometimes, when she was distressed, the shower in her bathroom would run for an hour or more. Only then did Maddy realise she’d detected whiffs of the same scent on her father when she’d curled up against him.

“Happy birthday, Maddy,” said her mother into her hair.

Maddy held her tightly. Her mother was plump now, no longer the muscled soldier she must have been when Maddy was born. “My birthday’s tomorrow.”

Shepard laughed. “I know, saying it anyway.” Another squeeze. “Sleep well, ‘kay? I’m sorry about — “

“Mum, it’s okay.” She’d long learned the right words to say, learned them from her father. Her mother always apologised too much after these incidents. “It happens. Love you.”

“Love you.” Another squeeze. 

Maddy returned the hug as tightly as she could.

When she was partway up the dark stairs, she looked back.

Her father rested his forehead against her mother’s. One hand gently traced her jaw, his eyes closed, an apologetic, crooning sound coming from his throat. One of her hands was on his shoulder.

Maddy never wanted to get married.

When Shepard opened her eyes and caught Maddy’s gaze, Maddy leapt up the stairs as if they burned her.


End file.
